Guest posted by Darius “Bubs” Monsef, a 500S mentor & founder living on the Big Island of Hawaii eating malasadas and smelling the plumerias. Follow him @bubs or at his blog (hellobubs.com) I was signed up to be a judge & mentor at StartupWeekend Honolulu this weekend, but the more I thought about how I could best help local founders, I decided that maybe the best thing I could do would be to back my talk up with some walk. So, I’m going to go with an idea, and leave with a launched product… hopefully leading by example and documenting everything along the way to give more inexperienced founders a solid road map for launching their ideas. And with that idea …

SuperMentor Steph Hay (AKA Poison Ivy) is known at 500 Startups for her content expertise, UX skills, and giant hair. By day, as co-founder of FastCustomer, Steph works to rid the world from ever having to wait on hold again. By night, she co-organizes the DC Lean Startup Circle and learns Ruby so she can one day finish CakeRock. A thread in my inbox: “We have a lot of ideas on topics to write about that are relevant to our industry. But how should we go about producing content? Hire a copywriter?” Two primary follow-up questions I’d ask: 1. Do you want to find the messages that convert users to buyers?2. Do you want to establish yourself as an authority on …

The below is a guest post by Shireen Rahjou, Community & Media Relations Manager at .CO. You may have seen her running around SXSW in an orange t-shirt, spoiling all the .CO VIP’s (startups registered on a .CO domain). This social butterfly comes from a business background, holds a Masters in PR and she wants to be every .CO’s best friend. We’re excited to have .CO on board as a 2012 Annual Partner so we’ll definitely be seeing more of Shireen at future 500 events._______________________________________________________I can think back to the early 90’s and remember the bulky desktop computer that took an eternity to power on and once it was on, I needed my folks’ assistance figuring out the command to …

I’m kind of embarrassed to call myself a Venture Capitalist. In fact, most of us who call ourselves VCs should be too. Why? Because MOST of us are hypocrites, and have NO idea what we’re doing. Because we SUCK at EXACTLY the thing we’re supposed to help entrepreneurs do — build BIG, SCALABLE companies. Because MOST of us aren’t engineers. Because MOST of us aren’t designers. Because MOST of us aren’t internet marketers. Because MOST of us haven’t built a customer support team or run 24x7x365 network operations centers. And yet… MOST venture capitalists seem to think we know EXACTLY what we’re doing when we tell our founders who ARE engineers, designers, & marketers what to do. We tell them …

Our buddies (and portfolio company) over at Visual.ly created this awesome infographic depicting the last 18 months of 500 Startups. It’s hard to believe how much has happened since then. Enough with the prose. On with the pretty pictures! First, a new video featuring most of our partners. You’ll notice a few new ones, because Paul Singh and Christen O’Brien have been promoted to partners. Bedy Yang and George Kellerman (not featured in the video) have also joined as venture partners! And finally, behold… the last 18 months of 500.

* This website is updated as of March 6, 2019. Past investment performance does not indicate future results. All users of this website should note these important Terms of Use governing the use of this website.